Keep your complaints coming

Wow, people do read my blog. People have commented on two issues so far:

Kurt says “The IDE insists on formatting some of my HTML when I swap to and from
designer/html mode, regardless of what I've selected in the text editor options. For
instance, it will add/remove line breaks, strip trailing slashes from <br />
and other single tag HTML entities. I'm to the point of hitting Ctrl+Z when I switch
back to HTML mode. :)”

To this I can say that we have certainly heard this complaint. Our goal for
the next release (Whidbey) is to reduce this as much as possible. If you are using
the Venus alpha and see this please file specific bugs on betaplace. If you
see these in VS 2002 or 2003 we’re sorry for the inconvenience.

Martinj Says “This one is a pet peeve of mine. Console apps should not behave
differently in the debugger than they do in the wild. I'm talking about the debugger
not waiting for a keypress to close the window. I might actually want to see the text
dumped to the output before the IDE closes it. Outside the debugger, you automatically
get the "Press a key to close" at program completion.”

I also agree, this is really annoying. I end up setting breakpoints at the end of
my main all the time in console apps. I’ve logged this as a suggestion for the next
version and I’ll let you know what the debugger team says.

A couple more problems:
(1) The HTML/XML editor does not support incremental search in a read-only file. If the file is read-only on disk, invoking the incremental search command will prompt to make the file writable. If it’s read-only because it’s under source control, the editor will prompt you to check out the file. (I have "Allow checked-in items to be edited" unchecked in Tools > Options > Source Control.)
(2) The memory debugger window’s font is controlled by the setting for "Text Editor". If this is set to a proportional font then the memory window does not display properly. It would be nice to have this controlled by a different setting or hardcoded to use a fixed-width font.

All the bugs we seem to find in our office are hard to pick up as they are intermittent. (like the ‘Stack Frame’ combo when on a toolbar becoming unresponsive, and the IDE not always pickup up on changed files after a source control operation (meaning we have to manually unload and reload the project)

Although not exactly bugs, these are the collective grumbles of our office about the Visual Studio IDE:
1) The project files aren’t XML (i.e. there is a dependency on attribute order)
2) Tasklist doesn’t have an ‘across all files in project’ option for picking up TODO:s , etc, as far as we can find, which would be excellent.
3) In the properties dialog when using the resource editor, double clicking on the ID combo changes it to the next ID instead of selecting the whole text (as is true in other combos).
4) Having a button to do a one-time track to this file in the solution explorer without having it do it al the time would be useful.

A couple of other task list ones (beside the lack of TODO display across the whole project):

1. No option (or at least none that I’ve found) for showing all tasks (or whatever subset one might prefer) by default.

2. When double-clicking a task (user-defined or compiler error/warning) to navigate to the associated line, if the line is in a collapsed region, the region is not expanded. One "lands" on the collapsed region definition rather than the target line. This is particularly annoying when working with long regions and/or nested regions.

Provide a history of command line parameters in the Debugging category of project properties. There’s a combobox now, but it expands to one-item list wih ‘Edit…’. I frequently run command-line apps with few sets of paramters, and have to retype it all the time.

What is the matter with you people? I can’t get an answer anywhere. Is microsoft so cold that it does not care about anyone? Seems to me to be so.. I have tried every where to get an answer. Nobody, at any site, will answer me. Now for the Upteenth time…why does windows freeze just short of me uploading one of my movies on vcr tape? If it is twenty minutes long, then it will freeze up after fifteen minutes. When I tried to do four hours,windows froze up just three minutes before time was up. Everything was wasted. Is microsoft willing to help? If so, How do I reach someone? Maybe I should just install Linux for that sort of work, and use XP just for surfing.